The 1st InfoWar: Antigua’s Copyright Threat and the Virtualization of Value

http://www.shellypalmermedia.com/2008/03/21/the-1st-infowar-antiguas-copyrigh…

Shelly Palmer writes a nice editorial that could have come from a William Gibson novel — small island nation gets pissed at its neighbor and starts threatening to hit them where it hurts by destroying the value of their enemy’s biggest export.

While we all think of the Chinese Red Army running DVD replication factories it’s small countries like Antiqua who can try to exercise this “nuclear option” for intellectual property. It’s MAD (mutually assured destruction) in that they’d cripple the retail value chain for intellectual property in their own country and depress the value of their enemy’s IP throughout the rest of the globe.